This was a really good article, but its... I don't want to say "sympathetic" tone, but its gentle skewing of events in favor of the farmers strikes me as extremely dishonest, given that the audience to whom this is aimed will not know the mechanics of the game.

Heck, even the quoted bit there is ridiculously skewed - this is clearly a PVP server, and as such, everyone out in an isolated part of the world farming those mobs is an open target, especially given the highly desireable nature of the monsters there. But the article provides little to no context for this outside of "he was killed there by other players who don't like him :( btw this researcher says that people who don't like farmers are racist."

Now let me state up front, I am opposed to RMT. Let me also state that I had several ongoing relationships with farmers on my server, a PVE server. With that in mind, farmers were (and still are) notorious for things like "ninjaing" items in instance runs, "dancing" in front of other players flagged hoping to trick them into flagging before killing them, etc. All activities that would cause someone to be reviled in game regardless of their other activities.

That said, with some farmers, who behaved on the whole just as other players, I (and the server in general) got along famously.

Let me just paste something from my gaming forums I wrote on the subject:

"I used to hang out a lot with a Chinese goldfarmer on his 6pm to 6am (server) shift. He was very well spoken in English, and was working his way through college to get a psychology degree. He was probably single-handedly responsible for tanking the Black Dragonscale market.

Now he had a quota, I believe it was 200 gold a shift, but any amount OVER that was wasted, and he had to turn over all BOE epics found to his boss, but as long as he made 200 gold in a shift he could spend the rest of his shift doing whatever he wanted.

So he'd sell me all his black dragonscale stacks for exactly 200 gold and run off to go instancing for fun, and I would turn around and sell them for a profit on my own time. He'd also give me BOE epics to sell and split the profit on because otherwise they were "wasted profit" to him - and a single BOE epic meant not having to farm dragonscales."

He wasn't the only guy, but he was the guy I ended up spending many nights talking to, as we both did our best to earn in-game cash for our own ends.

In any event, it's a weird and complex issue, but I don't really think this article is catching the whole story properly.

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Posted by: fashionhause on June 22, 2007 06:51 PM

If the farmer only farm gold and doing nothing to other player that'd be better, beside ninjaing items,
the most annoying thing when i play WoW on my mage(with the ability to 'conjure' food and water) is when a farmer come up to and say
"100 water and food" or "water and food" and open trade, and keep asking i have to run away.
(as i suspect their boss taught them one sentence and always use it if you see a mage available)

the weirdest one i found was "can i have blue?" or "give me blue" which i think he meant water, i must say that's very annoying!

Posted by: kungpaochocolate on June 26, 2007 04:44 AM